Mobilizing the welfare vote.

• Position: Column

Suffolk, New York It hasn't been easy for Terri Scofield to become a Democratic candidate for the New York state assembly.

Just a little more than a year ago, Scofield and her son were living on an Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) grant of $576 a month plus food stamps. Like many women receiving welfare, Scofield was fleeing an abusive relationship and moved from job to job.

In the spring of 1993, while attending Suffolk Community College through the federal JOBS program--an option the state no longer allows--Scofield and some other students began sharing stories of the problems they were having navigating the welfare system. Thus began the JOBS Network Club (the name changed to Suffolk Welfare Warriors the following year). The group ultimately won an injunction against the county for treating financial aid for education as income and cutting off AFDC recipients'child care as a result.

Scofield works as a full-time staff person for Suffolk Welfare Warriors, which which shares information among the county's 38,500 welfare families. The group has also staged protests at local legislative hearings and serenaded the Suffolk County legislature with specially written Christmas carols like "Away in a Shelter" and "Families Standing 'Round an Open Fire."

Scofield was surprised when a local legislative aide approached her this May, asking her to run for state assembly as a Democrat. Before they asked her to run, she says, "The extent of my involvement with the Democratic Party in Suffolk County, other than being a registered Democrat, was to call them up and harangue them for acting like Republicans."

The district she was offered was, her Democratic contact admitted, an incredibly uphill battle--a heavily Republican district with an incumbent on Long Island's conservative east end. "I love to take on impossible tasks," Scofield says.

For the last several months, she has combined her hectic Suffolk Welfare Warriors schedule...